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May 30, 2014 - Child Care Payment Update

5/30/2014

IDHS continues to fine tune the Child Care Management System launched on January 14, 2014. We are doing our best to keep providers informed on the progress of payments. We are also working hard on correcting payment errors that occurred in recent weeks.

To find out when your payment was entered, you can use 800-804-3833. That number will usually tell of entered payments the working day after entry, approval of a payment the working day following the approval, and generally will tell about issue of a payment two working days after the issue. Licensed providers must enter the IVR case numbers to hear information on their payments. Please refer to the most recent child care certificate or other child care case information for the IVR number.

**Note: With June starting on a Sunday, payments entered on June 1st will have an official entry date of June 2nd. Payments entered on June 1st will not be able to be heard on 800-804-3833 until Tuesday June third, and DHS staff or CCR&R staff will not be able to see the entry information until June 2nd.

If you have a question regarding a redetermination, approval, address change, certificate needed, the number of days entered in for a payment, and many other questions, you will need to contact your child care office that takes care of your case. Also, contact the child care office that handles the case for any payment that was issued but was not received, or for those returned undeliverable to The Office of the Comptroller.

For this program, we draw our Federal Child Care funds in the middle of the month each month which allows us to approve and issue the majority of the payments. Some months we still have funds from the previous month that allow us to approve some payments early in the current month. Many payments with an entry date up to May 27 were approved by DHS on Thursday night May 29th. Some payments require extra technical work to process the payments which can cause delays on the approval of those payments. Funding should remain available throughout May, and maybe a little bit for payments entered on June 1st or June 2nd.

**For issued payments, many payments that were approved by DHS on May 28th should be issued by The Office of the Comptroller on Friday night May 30th. As funding continues for a few more days, payments will continue to be issued.

We realize there are some isolated problems with approved and issued payments lately that did not calculate correctly. A resolution and a reimbursement process was mailed in late March . The letter that was mailed can also be viewed on the DHS web site of: www.dhs.state.il.us. For those payments that had incorrect co-pay deduction, DHS has started to reimburse the amount owed as an add-on to the case(s) effected. Providers should have seen the reimbursement on payments issued in May. We also realize there continues to be some issues with union deduction still being too high for some providers. DHS is reviewing the deductions, and for those providers with too large a deduction, a reimbursement should be determined soon.

The child care payment process is 3 Steps. Your payment is entered into the child care system, when funding is available, and the system has no errors the payment is approved by DHS. After the payment is approved, generally the payment will be issued by The Office of the Comptroller 1-3 working days after the approval. Paper checks are mailed the next working day after being issued. Direct Deposit and debit card payments are in accounts 2 working days after issue. Weekends and holidays are not working days.